I AM now haunted by a companion picture to Lambert Orme—the picture of Jacques de Chaumont. It is a mistake doubtless to place these two in juxtaposition, nor have I any right to suppose that others share my interest in the freaks of literary temperament. And yet Orme and de Chaumont complete each other as a piece of buhl is completed by a piece of counter-buhl. It would be a pity to separate them. Lambert began so foolishly and ended on such a note of seriousness: de Chaumont possessed such possibilities but became in the end idiotic beyond the realm of comprehension. His story, fortunately, will not be believed: but I give it none the less.
The Europeans, during the heyday of King Edward’s reign, crowded to Oxford. They founded a dining club which they called “The Cosmopolitan.” On alternate Saturdays they would meet for dinner at the Clarendon. The food came from Gunter’s and the wines from France. One was expected to get drunk but not disgustingly drunk; and afterwards one played roulette for stakes for larger than I could possibly afford. I was passing at the time through my snobbish period, a phase which in its acute form lasted till 1911, whereafter it became endemic merely, and of late, I feel, but epidemic. At the time, however, I was deeply impressed by the Cosmopolitan. I was excited by their historic names, their Sholte dinner jackets with the emerald facings, their Cartier watches, their Fabergé cigarette cases, their faint smell of Chypre and Corona cigars; by the fact that they were all far older and more mundane than myself. The Bullingdon, of course, was the Bullingdon; but the Cosmopolitan had a slightly illicit flavour about it: I took to it hesitatingly as a Newnham girl takes to Crème de Menthe.
The President of the club, if I remember rightly, was Talleyrand-Périgord. The outstanding members were Orloff, and Appony, and Econoumo and Andrea Buoncompagni, and Argenti, and Enrico Visconti Venosta, and Louis René de Gramont, and Goluchowski, and Schweinitz, and the Marquis de Chaumont. I was introduced to the latter by de Gramont, who, since he was at Balliol, was the one I knew best. De Chaumont, even at that date, was an intellectual. De Gramont was not.
I remember particularly one gala evening on which was celebrated the anniversary of the club’s foundation. It must have been their only anniversary, since shortly afterwards Talleyrand, who was a German subject and as such a Rhodes Scholar, was sent away owing to flippant behaviour: for which, on arrival in Berlin, he had his ears boxed by his Emperor in front of the whole Court. Appony also left, and so did de Gramont. Visconti went and lived in a little cottage at Iffley where he studied Bergson: de Chaumont returned to Paris: the club was dissolved. But meanwhile, one warm evening towards the end of May, they celebrated their anniversary dinner. They had by then got bored with the Clarendon, and the dinner for some odd reason took place in the East Gate Hotel. I went as the guest of de Gramont: I sat between him and Enrico Visconti. The Marquis de Chaumont sat opposite. The general conversation was carried on in varying forms of English: the particular conversations were conducted in every language under the sun.
I felt a little self-conscious at first and ungainly: an unpleasant feeling that I did not properly belong. At such moments one realises one’s own identity as something physically detached. I saw myself sitting there, my rather scrubby dinner-jacket, my rather wispy black tie, those two inadequate studs, that pink and bumptious face, that curly hair and nose: that voice of mine—surely there was something very unlike me about my voice? And what would Balliol say? I was, and still am, extremely sensitive to Balliol opinion. I felt somehow that the Cosmopolitan did not stand for the things that Balliol stood for: I felt that what the Balliol people criticised in me was exactly that lax strand which had led me to dinner that evening at the East Gate Hotel: as I looked and listened I felt that, for the purposes of Empire, Balliol was right every time: I felt ashamed and apprehensive. After all, it would be rather ghastly if I were seen.
The conversation by then was becoming animated: people were beginning to drink toasts and throw strawberries across the table. De Gramont rose and went and sat next Appony: de Chaumont rose and took the thus vacant chair beside me. He was a pale young man, with straight fair hair brushed backwards, and little red lips, wet and mobile. He suffered from an affection of the eyes which watered a good deal and fringed his eyelids with a slight inflammation. He had learnt English from his nurse and spoke it fluently with a strong cockney accent. He was, at the time, engaged in studying English literature: he was at the moment rather drunk.
“I ’ave discovered,” he said, “the foinest loines in English literature.”
“There are many fine lines in English literature.”
“No, but these are really admirable. You know them doubtless? They are by Percy Shelley:
“Toime loike a dom of many-coloured glass …”
“It isn’t ‘dom,’” I interrupted, “it’s dome.”
“Toime like a dome …” he began again in a shrill recitative.
I changed the subject. “Where,” I said to him, “did you learn English?” It was then that he told me about the nurse: it was then that I told him about the cockney accent. “You mean,” he said, “a vulgar accent, un accent du peuple?” I said that that had in fact been my meaning. He became thoughtful at this and drank some more champagne. He then continued the conversation in French. He told me about Madame de Noailles, he recited with great fervour one of the Eblouissements. He was still reciting when, arm in arm, we walked up the High Street. In front of us reeled the other members of the club, their diamonds and their green facings flashing gaudily under the arc-lights. They sang a song in German. I tried to loiter a little behind. I observed two undergraduates leave the pavement at their approach and stand to watch them in disgusted amazement. They were still staring as de Chaumont passed them spouting Madame de Noailles, holding me firmly and affectionately by the arm. One of the undergraduates was Laurence Jones, the other was Julian Grenfell. They observed me. “For God’s sake,” I whispered to de Chaumont, “do shut up.” He paid no attention.
We had roulette afterwards in Talleyrand’s rooms above the Bullingdon. De Chaumont stopped playing roulette and sat in the window-seat, looking out upon the warm and gentle night. I went and sat beside him. “Isn’t it marrvellous?” he said. “You mustn’t say marrvellous, you must say marvellous.” An hour later we walked back together along the Turl. “Isn’t it mauvellous?” he kept repeating, “isn’t it mauvellous?”
In the few weeks which remained of that, his last, term at Oxford, I saw a great deal of Jacques de Chaumont. He would drop into my rooms in the evening exquisitely although simply dressed, and would speak to me at length and not without ardour of the more obscure tendencies in modern French literature. I was not fully aware at the time of the conflict which must even then have been apparent between the two directing forces of his life, a conflict which in the years that followed played havoc with his happiness and ended, in circumstances which will subsequently be related, by robbing him of a first-class chance of immortality. I realised, of course, that he had a sincere passion for literature, and that he was at the same time particularly sensitive to the advantages, such as they are, of family and position. I did not foresee, however, that his snobbishness would become as a bloated moth fretting the garment of his intellect, that the blue particles in his blood would wage eternal warfare on the red corpuscles with which, in spite of his anodyne appearance, he was unquestionably endowed. I observed, it is true, that considerations of high life assumed for him an importance which appeared, even to me, a little exaggerated. But I did not realise that these same considerations could in any circumstances become an acute mental torment, destroying his intellect as those of others have been sapped by drink, or drugs, or perversion. Yet so it was. His ancestry, his parents, his collaterals loomed in front of him in vast and menacing proportions: the side-streets in his mind were tortuous and quite interesting, but they were interrupted at frequent intervals by rigid avenues leading him back, and so inevitably, to the Rue de Varennes.
I can recollect, in the light of subsequent experience, certain symptoms which show me that his disease had already fastened upon him at the age of twenty-two. They had told him, a little unkindly perhaps, that the most exclusive club in England was not, as he had heard, the Royal Yacht Squadron but the equally Royal Automobile Club in Pall Mall. He had thereupon pulled endless strings to secure election to this institution: he had gone up to London and paid a round of calls as if seeking for admission to the Académie Française; when his efforts were crowned by triumphant success, he had some new cards printed with “Royal Automobile Club” in the bottom left-hand corner.
I can recall also a conversation which startled me at the time. Although he concentrated upon all that was best in the University life around him, yet there were moments when his watery eyes would turn northwards a little wistfully, to Blenheim, or southwards, a little wistfully, to Wytham Abbey. We dined at the latter house one evening, and it was in the dog-cart returning under heavy star-twinkling trees that the conversation took place which now recurs to me. I had been saying how much, how very much, I liked Lady Abingdon.
“Is she smart?” de Chaumont asked me.
I was taken aback by this, and asked him what he meant exactly.
“Is she worldly, I mean?”
I assured him that Lady Abingdon was one of the most unworldly women I had ever known. He was silent for some time and when he spoke again it was about Mr. Walter Pater. When I got to bed I realised that by “worldly” he had meant “mondaine.”
The foretaste of his final failure, of his final rejection of immortality (a rejection which interests me exceedingly and which forms the climax of this story), was given me some ten months later at Florence. I had spent February, March and April living with an Italian family at Siena in conditions of great discomfort and unremitting study. I would work the whole day without ceasing (I was making up for the time which I had lost but assuredly not wasted at Balliol), and after dinner I would walk through those narrow streets, past the incessant scream of cinema-bells, past the idling Tuscan aristocracy, and out by the great gate into the sudden hush of the surrounding hills. I would walk in this way round the looming walls, entering by another gate, stepping in again among the lights and jingle of the town. It had been a regular, a lonely and an exacting three months: I felt I deserved some relaxation: I went for four days to Florence to stay with Enrico Visconti. He lived in a villa on the hill where there was a huge and scented bath-room and fire-flies flickering in and out among the orange tubs. It was very hot, and I was a little depressed by the blatant perfection of the whole business, by the pressure of my one-and-twenty years. Visconti was charming to me and told me a great deal about Bergson and Benedetto Croce which I might not otherwise have known. And one afternoon he took me to tea with a lady, a Countess d’Orsay, who lived on the ground floor of a house on the Lung’ Arno. The windows of her drawing-room were shuttered against the evening sun: it was quite dark in the room, a vague impression of people sitting in groups, of red damask and of an almost overpowering smell of narcissus. I was introduced to my hostess, and very shortly afterwards the door opened and in came de Chaumont, a very grey Homburg, and some very suède gloves, in his hand. He did not see me at first, because he was coming from the light into the dark: my own eyes by then were becoming adjusted to the obscurity and I said, “Halloa, Jacques!” He was not displeased to see me and said, “’Ow are you? What a surprise.” We sat down behind a red damask screen: Visconti, de Chaumont and myself. At the further end of the room, behind the smell of narcissus, was a group of Italians talking to each other in the shadows. De Chaumont began to ask me about Siena, and then went on to talk at length, but not without ardour, about Italian literature. I told him that I liked d’Annunzio’s early poems. He said that he liked them too: did I know the sonnet which began “Convalescente di squisiti mali”? I said I did. Did I know the sonnet which began “Anche a me l’oro come a Benvenuto”? I said I didn’t. He began to recite it. I thought that this, for a foreigner in an Italian house, was a rather bumptious thing to do. But he continued. He did it rather well. A hush descended on that darkened drawing-room and I became unpleasantly aware that the Italians over there were listening. De Chaumont finished—declaiming the last triumphant line with great courage and distinction. A voice—a woman’s voice?—no, a man’s voice, a voice like a silver bell, broke in upon us from the corner of the room. The sonnet was being repeated by someone else and with an intonation of the utmost beauty. I leant back in the large red sofa revelling in the languors of that lovely voice, in the amazing finish of that lovely sonnet. There was a hush when he had finished. Visconti whispered to me, “It’s d’Annunzio himself.” I was too excited to be sorry for de Chaumont.
D’Annunzio then recited some further poems, and notably that splendid metrical achievement called “the rain among the pines.” I was enthralled. I crouched back among the cushions, conscious of an emotional pressure such as I had not as yet experienced. He finished and refused to recite again. The sun, as it illumined the green slits of the shutters, had turned to red. Our hostess went to them and flung them open: the room was lightened. I could now see d’Annunzio sitting there playing with an agate paper-knife. I could not have believed that anything not an egg could have looked so like an egg as d’Annunzio’s head. He was not very polite either to me or to de Chaumont. I wished rather that he had remained a voice in the dark.
We left eventually and walked along the quay. I was still fervent with excitement. I felt somehow that de Chaumont was unresponsive. I supposed that he was mortified by what had indeed been an unexpected humiliation. I did not press for an explanation. But that evening, sitting on the terrace after dinner, I realised that his reserve arose from more curious and recondite feelings. D’Annunzio, to his mind, was not a man of family: in feet his name wasn’t d’Annunzio at all, it was something else. He asked Visconti whether he knew the real name. Visconti couldn’t remember. “E un nome,” he said, “che fa ridere.” I said that it was Gaetano something. Visconti said he thought it was Gaetano Rapagnetta.
“Mais dans tous les cas,” commented de Chaumont decisively, “c’est un garçon qu’on ne peut pas voir.”
Visconti, who was older than either of us, was much amused at this, and laughed a great deal.
It was several years before I again met Jacques de Chaumont. In the interval he had published two volumes of his poems and gained thereby a not inconsiderable reputation. I thought his verses good myself and I enjoyed reading them. They were of the pre-war type of French poetry; at the top of each poem there was an epigraph from Laforgue or Rimbaud or Oscar Wilde, and at the bottom a date and the names of such places as Clarens, Coombe-Warren, Halberstadt or Pérouse. The stage-properties which enlivened his later work, the aquariums, cock-tail shakers and the Otis elevators, had not as yet disclosed themselves to his Muse; these two early volumes were all about his own extreme and ardent youth, about greyhounds and gladioli in the manner of Madame de Noailles. The second of the two volumes, moreover, contained some translations from Hafiz and a rather empty sonnet to Nijinsky.
I wrote to him about his poetry, and in return he sent me a large photograph of himself inscribed in a handwriting that had certainly grown larger since the Oxford days. “À Harold Nicolson,” he wrote, “cette image sage comme une image. Jacques de Chaumont.” The photograph showed him in a smart felt hat lighting his pipe and looking upwards, as he did so, at the photographer. It was an expensive sort of portrait and it arrived in a fawn-coloured portfolio with silk ribbons and the name of the shop embossed in gold. But in spite of that there was something a little equivocal about it, something which I felt could not have been wholly welcome in the rue de Varennes. It may have been the pipe, or the hat, or that upward expression. “Jacques,” I thought, “is becoming Bohemian.” But that was nonsense. I looked at it again. No, there was nothing at all Bohemian about that photograph.
He published a third volume of poetry containing a sort of Pierrot masque which was very dull indeed. I heard that the book had fallen flat; and shortly afterwards I heard that de Chaumont was coming out to Constantinople in Madame de Béthune’s yacht. There were seven people on that yacht, and by the time they reached the Bosphorus they had got considerably on each other’s nerves. My chief, who was a friend of Madame de Béthune, gave a large banquet for her the night after her arrival. He invited all the young Turks to meet her. There was Enver in his neat little uniform, his hands resting patiently upon his sword-hilt, his little hair-dresser face perked patiently above his Prussian collar. There was Djemal, his white teeth flashing tigerish against his black beard: there was Talaat with his large gipsy eyes and his russet gipsy cheeks: there was little Djavid who spoke French fluently and who hopped about, being polite. (It is odd, when I think of it, how many of my acquaintances have been murdered, how many have been hanged.) We waited over half an hour for the Béthune party, and then the Ambassador told me that I must rearrange the dinner, as he could wait no longer. I was annoyed at this, since when seven people drop out of a dinner of thirty-five it is difficult at short notice to rearrange the places. I went into the wide corridor outside the drawing-room and began rather sulkily to draw plans upon a sheet of foolscap. The Ambassador, an impatient man for all his charm and brilliance, came out and told me to hurry up. I resumed my task feverishly and in despair; a sound of voices reached me from the central court below: I dashed aside my pencil and my paper with relief; they were all squabbling together as they came up the staircase. De Chaumont came last.
I had put him next to myself at dinner, thinking he would be pleased by this attention. He was not pleased. His eyes wandered watering around the table with an expression which no trained diplomatist can fail to recognise. He was thinking that he should have been accorded a higher place. I explained that I had put him next to myself on purpose.
“That’s roight,” he said, “and oim jolly well pleased to see you.”
I felt that he might have said that before. We talked for a bit about old times. We then spoke of his poetry. It was a little awkward for me about that last volume which, as I have said, had fallen flat. I remarked that I had thought it a very delicate piece of work, which was strictly true. He was rather bitter about the whole business. “You see,” he said, “were oi Monsieur Jacques Duval oi should not be exposed to these hattacks. But as it is, the Jews, the Freemasons, and the Socialists controive to insult me. Moy own people of course object to my publishing, at least in moy own name. Oi assure you that it is very difficult for someone with a name like moine to be taken seriously.” I suggested that both Lamartine and Chateaubriand had triumphed over similar difficulties. He smiled at me pityingly and murmured something about country squires; “Ces hobereaux,” he said. I realised how wide a gulf must be fixed between La Nouvelle Revue Française and the Rue de Varennes.
The next day he came to luncheon with me: we were to spend the afternoon in the bazaars. I asked Pierre de Lacretelle to come with us. It was not a successful arrangement, since Jacques insisted on talking English and Lacretelle as the day wore on became visibly annoyed. I must confess that de Chaumont on that occasion proved maddeningly superior. He arrived in a yachting cap and very white flannel trousers. He talked the whole time about people who were completely unknown to Lacretelle or myself. And he went on and on about how difficult it was for a man of family to succeed in literature. I asked him why, in such cruel circumstances, he did not change his name. He was evidently shocked by this suggestion and scarcely disguised the fact that he considered my remark ill-bred. “Soyons sérieux,” he remarked as we entered the blue galleries of the bazaar.
Lacretelle, I fear, behaved rather badly. He urged de Chaumont to purchase the ugliest and most expensive objects that could be found. And he kept on saying that it was a mistake to visit the bazaars in a yachting cap as it made people raise their prices: besides, they might guess who de Chaumont really was. We said good-bye to him, a little coolly, at Galata bridge. It was then that Lacretelle exploded. He said that there were only two types of men whom he really detested. The first were the gratins and the second the rastas. De Chaumont by some strange alchemy combined both these qualities. “Et en outre,” he continued, “il exagère. On n’est pas snob à ce point là. Et remarquez-le bien, c’est un fat. Il fait des bouts rimés qu’il appelle des vers: il achète des descentes de lit qu’il appelle des tapis.”
During the few days that the yacht remained at Constantinople I avoided asking Lacretelle a second time to meet de Chaumont. I suggested to the latter that rather than endure the conflict between his breeding and his writing, he had better decide firmly to sacrifice the one or the other. It didn’t much matter which he did. He agreed that the problem was one which imposed itself. I suggested that he might consult Madame de Béthune, who was a woman of judgment and intelligence.
“Une femme remarquable,” he assented, “une femme remarquable. Mais américaine, américaine…”
It was Lacretelle’s indignation, rather than anything that he had said or done himself, which opened my eyes to the defective in Jacques de Chaumont. At Oxford his intellectualism had detached itself as something vivid and sincere. I had taken it for granted that de Chaumont’s passion for literature was the unquenchable fire of his being, and I did not consider it possible that such a flame could fizzle out under the cold water of the rue de Varennes. It did fizzle out. It is possible, of course, that had he lived in the grand siècle his two dominant inspirations might have mingled in the production of respectably sincere poetry: had it not been for the war he might even have produced some decent work in the manner of Henri de Régnier. But the war drove the gentle muse of second-rate poetry away from the colonnades and gardens and made her walk the streets. In one volume, his last volume, de Chaumont accompanied her, and there was a great deal about asphalt and the lovely legs of the Eiffel Tower and the beauties of reinforced concrete: his muse walked the pavements with the others, but she wore goloshes and was terribly afraid of being recognised: so that his fourth volume, as his third, was a failure. The promise of his juvenilia had not been fulfilled: he proclaimed that literature had gone to the Jews and Socialists: he returned to the fold of his collaterals: he read nothing except the Action Française: he began to think of marriage: he had long discussions with the Abbé Munier: he ceased even to get his clothes in London: he bought a pair of yellow dogskin gloves.
When I met him again in 1919 the effects of this degeneration were sadly apparent. He had spent the greater part of the War on the staff of General Lyautey in Morocco. On his return to Paris he was rapidly demobilised. Even as Rimbaud before him, he repudiated not only literature but his literary friends. I saw him at Foyot’s, where I was dining with Lacretelle and Jean Cocteau: he sent me a note by the waiter asking me to lunch with him the next day at the Ritz: he paid no attention to my two companions.
It was with great relish that I was able the next day to tell him what an ass Cocteau had said that he was. He was rather pathetic about it. He almost convinced me that for his futile faubourg flabbiness there was something to be said. He spoke of his mother; a widow: she was getting frail and old: he was an only son: he would not wish to cause her pain. He spoke of his aunt de Maubize, of his uncle the prince, of how in France, under the third republic, it was impossible to compromise. “You see,” he explained, “there are so few of us. We must keep together. We are the trustees of refoinement and distinction.” I knew but little at that time of Parisian conditions and I almost believed him. I merely asked him how such people as the de Beaumonts, or Princess Marie Murat managed to reconcile their dynastic and racial duties with the enormous fun they got out of life, with the intellectual benefits they conferred on others. He smiled at me a little pityingly, making it clear that I was talking of things which only a very few people were privileged to understand. “It’s moy mother,” he added again. I had never seen his mother, and he was evidently in no way anxious that I should do so. I pictured her as an aged and a pathetic creature in black lace and diamonds, engrossed in religion, engrossed in Jacques. I know full well how these obligations can grow upon one, how loving hands can stretch out from the older generation to strangle the ardour of the next. How many of my friends had suffered from such infanticide, how many had cramped their style for fear of what Aunt Juliet would say at Littlehampton, or Uncle Roderick at Bath. I felt that I understood de Chaumont’s point of view, I felt that on the whole he was behaving rather well.
And then, by chance, I met his mother at luncheon.
Jacques, I am glad to say, had not been invited. She was a brisk and manly little woman like a fox-terrier, and she rushed up to me jumping about and firing off little short sharp questions in a series of rapid barks. I was a friend of Jacques? He had often spoken of me. What were we to do about it? Was he in love? Did I think he would marry? Why had he chucked writing? Why had he dropped all his interesting friends? Why had he become such a bore? Et snob—enfin? She turned to a woman who was standing beside us. “C’est inconcevable, ma chère, à quel point ce garçon est devenu snob.” “Ça doit etre le jockey,” her friend answered.
Madame de Chaumont agreed that it must be the jockey. They turned to me simultaneously—did I also think that the jockey was the cause of Jacques’ inexplicable behaviour? I am not easily shocked, but I admit that at this question I blushed scarlet. I stammered something about his never having told me anything about it. I have since made frequent endeavours to remember exactly the words I used. I may have said, “He has never spoken to me about the jockey”; on the other hand, I may have said, “He has never spoken to me about a jockey.” When I realised subsequently that they were referring merely to the Jockey Club; I saw how vast a difference, what a gulf between correctitude and flagrant indiscretion, stretched between the use on my part of that definite or that indefinite article. To this day I remain uncertain which of the two I employed. I remember only that I was acutely embarrassed and that everybody laughed.
It was about this time that the prix Goncourt was awarded to Proust for “Du coté de chez Swann.” Proust began to be lionised. He would lie in bed all day in his stuffy darkened room, and in the evening he would put on his elaborate evening clothes (those white-kid gloves clasping an opera hat) and attend the receptions given to the members of the Peace Conference. He appeared there like Beethoven at the Congress of Vienna. He would flit about looking like a Goanese bridegroom. He would flit from Mr. Balfour to M. Venizelos, from Marshal Foch to M. Berthelot. He was very friendly, and ill, and amusing. He enjoyed hearing stories about the Conference. He seemed quite unaware of the early and enduring monument of his own impending fame. He drank a great deal of black coffee and stayed up very late.
On one such occasion he said that he would like to introduce me to the Marquis de Chaumont. I said that this was unnecessary since I had known de Chaumont for many years. He begged me not to be so unintelligent and so gross. Surely I must realise the pleasure it gave him to take an Englishman by the arm, to propel him across the room, to say, “Mon cher Jacques, permettez …” to hesitate and then to begin again, “Permettez, Monsieur, que je vous présente mon grand ami le Marquis de Chaumont.” For me it would be perfectly easy. I should only have to say, “Oh! but I know de Chaumont, we were at Oxford together.” And then the three of us could sit on that sofa over there and talk about the other people. “Vous voyez bien,” he said, “c’est d’une simplicité. Allons-y! Ne soyez pas inintelligent!” I surrendered myself to this comedy. Proust purred like a small Siamese cat. De Chaumont, I am glad to say, was exquisitely polite. We sat on the sofa as arranged. As arranged, we talked about the other people.
After a few minutes de Chaumont rose and left us. We then talked about de Chaumont. Proust was indignant with me for regretting that so bright a talent should have been ruined by an undue deference to foreground. He did not agree with me in the least. He said that there were a great many young men who could write much better than Jacques de Chaumont, and very few young men who could show so many quarterings. It was right and fitting that Jacques should concentrate on the qualities which he possessed in so highly specialised a manner. The world was becoming too diverse: it was necessary to specialise. “Il ne fait que cultiver sa specialité! Il fait bien.”
“I shall now speak to you,” he said, “on the subject of elegance.”
I was all attention, but fate cheated me of that discourse. We were interrupted by our hostess: Proust rose, and a few minutes later he drifted away. I leant against the window watching him. A little white face over there, those bruised eyes, that blue but shaven chin, those white gloves resting upon the opera hat. He was being universally affable. I never saw him again.
I walked away from that party with Jacques de Chaumont. I told him how excited I was by Proust, how Antoine Bibesco had promised on the following Sunday to take me to dinner with him in his bedroom. De Chaumont was not enthusiastic: “Un homme remarquable, évidemment, un homme remarquable: mais juif, juif.” And that dinner never materialised. I have recently seen the letter which Proust wrote on that occasion to Antoine Bibesco. It was a letter in which he begged the latter to come alone on Sunday and not to bring me with him. The letter was quite kindly worded.
A few weeks later we heard that Proust was again seriously ill. He had been working at Pastiches et Mèlanges, and the effort had exhausted him. De Chaumont came to see me in obvious tribulation, carrying a letter in his hand. I read the letter. It was from Proust, saying that he had written a short sketch in the manner of St. Simon and would Jacques mind if he figured in it by name? The latter was embarrassed how to answer. He did not wish to offend Proust, yet on the other hand, well, really … I said that I, for my part, would have been in the seventh heaven had Proust showed any inclination to insert me in Pastiches et Mèlanges. De Chaumont said “it moight be jolly well all roight for a foreigner, but moy mother would not loike it.” I told him that I had met his mother, and was convinced that she would not mind in the least. He was only slightly disconcerted. “Then there is moy aunt, de Maubize. She ’ates Jews.” I began to get a little angry at this, and told him that I doubted whether Proust would live for long, that he was the greatest living writer, that Jacques was sacrificing a free gift of immortality, and that what on earth could it matter about his aunt? He sat there turning the letter over and over in his gloved hands. Suddenly he tore it up with a gesture of decision: he flung it into one of the large brass bowls that enlivened the foyer of the Majestic.
“Non!” he said, “non pas! Ça me ratera mon Jockey.”
The book appeared some months later and it contained no mention of Jacques de Chaumont. And the following year I met a member of the Jockey Club and asked him whether de Chaumont had been elected. He said that he had not been elected.